admin[at]uphook[dot]com

Monday, April 17, 2006

Today, I improved the website messaging system slightly. After looking at other personals sites, I saw that many people wrote something similar to:

"Your pic gets mine"

or

"Only responses w/ pics please"

or

"Don't reply unless you have a pic"

Now given my original messaging system, there would have to be an extra step before the poster could get a picture of the responder. First the responder would have to contact the poster. Then, the poster would have to allow the responder to have their email address so they can receive the pic. In order to eliminate this step, I integrated the ability to include a picture when sending a message to someone. The image is included as an attachment (just like regular email).

Now people can get right to it-- no dilly-dallying around with exchanging emails. You can send someone a picture just as easily as you can send them a message.

I also fixed a bug in the code that caused explorer to not render the profile lightboxes correctly. It seems like IE reads the CSS styles from the post page, as opposed to the lightbox page. While Mozilla reads them the other way around. I'm not sure which is correct, so I have redundant code in both files just in case. Better safe than sorry.

Next, I am considering an option to disable messages-- however this can be dangerous because there is no other way to retrieve the URL to manage a post (aside from bugging the admin). Plus, why make a post if you don't want people to respond? Isn't that the purpose of personal ads. If people want a place to post random stuff and not expect a response, they can go use a forum or post in their own blog or something.

However, I'll keep my ears open-- if its something most of the users want, I can certainly add the capability to disable messages. But in the interest of getting this thing marketed so it can attract some traffic, I think it can wait a while-- I have more important things to worry about.